(Rated by 2 people, viewed by 105 people)
Fairybliss.net has 2 Reviews
Below are the reviews left by other members on Fairybliss.net. Jump to review form?
julianguyen gave it
on 18th Oct 2012 and said:I love the header image. Wonderful. I love fractals :)
Great layout altogether - clean, bold, and unified.
I would set text-decoration: none; for the links in the navigation bar, the underlined text seems a unnecessary to me. The elements of the different header texts could have more mpact as well. Try using the same font you used in the "FairyBliss.net" logo for the h1s. It will unify the layout even more. You should still stick with the same others.
In the text box in underneath the "About Me" heading, the padding should be the same as that over the image above it. Try using a text-align: justify; in that area so it seems more "boxy".
I'm not a huge fan of longer sidebars. Nonetheless, I think you can still make it work. Try reducing the size of the categories heading perhaps. Stick to the main categories, instead of listing all of them. You don't want visitors to spend too much time there. The online users counter is also unnecessary, especially if your site isn't high traffic. I consider them a tacky novelty.
Another issue I saw with the layout was the footer. In terms of coding, there should not be a massive gap. If you are having difficulties with getting the footer to stick to the very bottom of the page, look for tutorials online (it's an easy fix with relative and absolute positioning). I will warn you that some browsers like IE, of course IE, will mess it up. An alternative you can try is just place the footer directly below the end of your container. Since all of your pages are long, they should appear to land at the bottom on the page.
Great site, it has a lot of potential. The content is great too. Fix up these CSS related issues and the quality of your site should improve :)
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![[img: avatar]](/avatars/yui.gif)
yui gave it
on 10th Sep 2012 and said:Hi! I'm Yui, and I'll be reviewing your site on Windows 7 in the latest version of Chrome at 1080p resolution.
As far as first impressions are concerned, I noticed that your site takes longer than I'm used to for your site to load. I'm not sure if this is more of a server issue or more of an optimization issue. I'm on a cable connection with an average download speed of ~30Mbps, so I'm fairly sure that the problem isn't with my connection. I went ahead and checked the size of your header image as a litmus test for image optimization, and found that it weighed in at ~360kb. While this isn't horrible, I do think that you can do quite a bit better without too noticeable a dip in quality. In Obscuro has a pretty good, if a bit dated, image optimization tutorial for Photoshop. There are also quite a few tools out there that will automatically process your images with varying degrees of lossiness. I've found that most of my layouts, including all images, stylesheets, and HTML files, can be accomplished in 150kb or less, mostly owing to good image optimization. And even though most people have broadband internet nowadays, remember that even a half-second delay can mean a significant drop in user satisfaction, so every little bit counts!
Either way, I like your header and general layout quite a bit. For the most part, it feels well-organized and makes decent use of my admittedly large screen resolution. The biggest issue that I have, however, is with the size of the text. Especially at my large resolution, the text just feels a bit too small for me to able to read comfortably. This problem is compounded by the fact that you've picked a font face that, at least on my computer, has very narrow characters and very thin lines. Given that this is a blog, I assume that you'll be expecting your readers to do quite a bit of reading. Immediately, I'm feeling like I don't want to spend the effort to read your entries. Another minor layout annoyance for me is that your site title/header doesn't link back to your home page. I know that there's a "Home" link in your navigation bar, but I've gotten used to being able to click the site titles as well, and I keep trying to click it without thinking and then remembering that it doesn't work on your site.
On closer inspection, one thing that immediately puts me off from your site is what feels to me like an abundance of ads. Ads on a personal site always feel a little tacky to me-- it just makes the site feel so much less... personal. I understand the urge to try to make a little a money off your site in order to offset hosting costs, etc., and I usually don't mind a small block in the siderbar or an inconspicuous banner at the bottom of the page. On your site, the banners that are in between the entries on your home page and right below your entry titles on your single entry pages are the ones that bother me the most. Not only do these ads distract from your content, make your whole layout feel less organized. And this may be just me, but just quickly scanning through your page, as soon as I see that ad in the middle of your page, all of the featured images for your posts suddenly feel like ads too. For example, when I saw the picture of the lenses on the post "Wishlist #2 – Photography part 1," at first I thought it was some sort of ad for a camera store, and I had to do a double-take before I realized that it was just a picture to go along with your post. I think that having that ad in between your posts, where I wasn't expecting to see an ad, put me on guard. And now, I'm looking for ads everywhere.
Along the same lines as my point about the advertising, I find the social icons at the bottom of all your posts and several of your pages to be a little too heavy-handed. I'm all for a few well-placed and inconspicuous sharing links, but when you have a box with 9 large icons and another box with 3 more icons at the end of each post, it starts to feel a little bit like like this Oatmeal comic. I also think that these links are misplaced on your Site and Contact pages because, let's face it, I don't know why anyone would want to share or "Like" a contact form.
In browsing through your entries, I get the impression that a large number of them consist either of links to other websites or lists of other people's work. In fact, 3 of the 7 posts currently on your homepage are of this format, including "15 Stunning CG Fairy Characters," "Link Love: Urban Sketchers," and "15 Digital Art Tutorials for Painting Realistic Eyes." It's great to promote the people and works that inspire you, and these kinds of posts are often very interesting to read, I would encourage you to try to produce more original content. This is your blog. When I visit it, I visit primarily because I want to see your art, read your tutorials, and hear your opinions. I can see from your layout that you're a talented web designer, and a quick glance at your Deviant art account proves that you're a great photographer and digital artist as well. Why not show some of that off on your blog?
Speaking of entries, I noticed that you have several posts that contain many large images, such as "15 Stunning CG Fairy Characters" or "30 Amazing CG Characters of 2011." For these posts it can become rather unwieldy to scroll through each image one at a time. I have a 1080p monitor, so it's not as bad for me, but imagine how much scrolling you'd have to do on a 1280x800 laptop or worse, a 1024x600 netbook! Rather than listing the images in large form, one by one, I would suggest using smaller thumbnails (and by smaller, I mean something on the order of 200x200px). I see that you're using WordPress, so I would suggest making use of WordPress's gallery shortcode to make things easy. That way, your visitors will be able to, at a glance, get an idea of what sorts of images are in your post and can then choose to click on the thumbnails if something catches his/her eye. This would also cut down on loading times, which would improve user experience overall.
Lastly, I wanted to point out that as I browsed your site, I found that it was at times difficult to figure out what's a link and what isn't. I think part of the problem is that your links are sometimes underlined (most normal-text links) and sometimes not (entry titles, the "Continue Reading [+]" links, footer links), which makes users work extra hard to figure things out. But more than that, the styling of your other text elements further confuse the matter. For example, your
strongtext is blue, which is a traditional link color. Youremtext is also stylized in such a way that at first I wondered if it represented link text. The confusion is especially pronounced on your Site page, wherestrong,em, and links are all present in abundance.Overall, I think that your site has a great deal of potential, and I can tell that you have a passion for art. I apologize if I was harsh in my review, but I felt that it was best to be blunt with my criticisms in the spirit of giving constructive feedback. I hope that my suggestions have been helpful to you. Good luck!
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